Fax

For some reason when I hear Sergey Brin wants Google to be the third half of my brain I feel a bit freaked out. Partially because they already know what everyone wants, desires - how often we search for our Exes, how often we check porn, etc. Then again, the next step seems to be logically implanting themselves in our heads so why am I surprised?

I just hope the third brain they put in me is out of Beta.

Then again, I could use some help from the Google guys when keeping track of all the excitement and new events surrounding ITEXPO.

It has been an extremely exciting week again for tech news and moreover for me personally as I got a chance to open up my Sony Dash and it is a very cool addition to my desktop as it allows me to view my photos and take advantage of widgets of all kinds which among other thinks allow me to see the pandas at the San Diego Zoo. This handy gadget has a slew of communications, social networking and calendar features as well but for now, I just want to see the pandas.

The big news from yesterday of course was Steve Jobs onstage pushing a slew of new iPods and a rental-only model for Apple TV and a social network integrated into iTunes.

Tech once again has been an amazingly vibrant market in the last week of August when news is generally slow. A recent trend has to do withtechnology companies playing nice with global governments to make sure they aren't rejected or find themselves out of favor like Google happens to be in China.

Nokia Spices up its Servers

Nokia for its part has decided to put servers in India to comply with local laws allowing government officials access to once impenetrable communications systems. You may recall India recently had some issues with not being able to monitor messages sent on Blackberrys.

I was a huge fan of SkyFire on Windows Mobile as it approximated the iPhone Safari browser on a Windows Mobile device while also supporting Flash. Now it seems this browser is coming to the iPhone and I wonder if Apple will force the company to disable the Flash support to ensure it abides by the company's rules of not allowing other "programming languages" to run on it.

This morning my new Sony Dash arrived in my office and I have been meaning to set it up all day but failed. This gadget is essentially an iPad which is more chunky, cheaper and needs a plug to operate. Still, everyone I meet with these days asks if I have one and it seems like a tech rite of passage to have one of these in your office.

It's been a busy day in the world of tech news as Google who already has a telecom service in Google Voice has expanded it into Gmail with a two-pronged goal of making it easier to call via Google's network and making the Skype IPO less lucrative. In addition, cloud computing has heated up with Nimbula receiving $15 million dollars so the ex-Amazon founders can purse providing private cloud services.

On the TMC front, we officially released TechZone360, our new site dedicated to all things tech and sporting a new and cool interface we hope you love. My readers got an unauthorized sneak peak last week (thanks for not squealing on me) and you can see it has evolved quite a bit these past days.

For those of you in telecom for decades you remember how in the mid-nineties Dialogic was the major company producing hardware and software building blocks in what we called the computer telephony/CTI spaces. They provided the market with DSP resource boards which at first powered simple voicemail systems but as Microsoft and Novell tried to muscle their way into the communications space, the world realized for the first time that telecom was becoming open and companies like Dialogic had the tools to convert analog signals into digital form and back.

A few years later the company was purchased by Intel and the brand became diluted and the company for all practical purposes fell off the radar. As an industry insider it was shocking really as an entire ecosystem of partners all of a sudden had to market and push product on their own.

I spent some of the weekend covering the Mark Hurd resignation with a post titled Hurd's Resignation and HP's Odd Half-Decade where I discussed just how logic-defying the situation surrounding the ouster of this CEO is.

Some big news yesterday in the world of technology had to do with Mark Hurd and his resignation following a sexual harassment investigation where he was not found guilty. The woman allegedly involved with Hurd was a former contractor and according to a close source there was no romantic or sexual relationship between the two. What is unusual though is the company on a conference call characterized their relationship as "close" and "personal."

The launch of RIM's latest phone the Torch 9800 certainly wasn't a secret and although I haven't had time to test the device as of yet, I am impressed with much of what the Canadian company has packed into its new gadget. Blackberry's have always excelled at e-mail and text messaging and you can expect this new phone with an integrated and very real keyboard to carry on that tradition but those people who prefer a touch-screen experience can benefit from the capacitive variety built into this device.

Some of the biggest challenges facing RIM as it competes with the iPhone 4 and Android devices are the lack of a really slick device, poor browsing, limited apps, poor camera, limited search and poor download speeds.